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Albert Haley
Just a nighttime fever, treatable with aspirin
and drinks from the water cup and still
he’s keeping us awake, tossing in the middle
of our bed, at age two so small yet so vital
that the adult-sized mattress
becomes a desert stretching beyond
the window pane.
Sometime deep into the night, sleep grudgingly
blankets us and we sag together,
a family of kinked hair, sour sweat,
and wrinkled pj’s until I am caught by morning’s
finger of light hooking me forward—
to study our little boy and listen to his breathing
in a vault the robbers fled mid-caper
without taking a thing. Left behind
are the puffed cheeks, the pink skin, the rise
and fall of the chest, and my unreasonable
expectations that once again are reality.
That is when I feel it, know it in my bones.
Somewhere some man, some woman,
with soup bowl scraped clean, is lying back
on a cot beside hard walls and spider webs
in overnight bloom, gripping beads as lips
frame unspoken, centered thoughts
and willed cohesion for a world falling apart.
It’s a simple request really, that all souls
be spared for exactly one more day
as we squirm sleepily and invite the air in,
let it out, and pass from tainted night
into a new dawn.
May there be thousands more like this,
mouthing the ancient prayers,
binding us together in our disease.
*”What Binds the World” received the runner-up prize for Ruminate’s 2007 Poetry Prize.
Albert Haley is writer-in-residence and associate professor of English at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas. His poems have appeared in Rattle, Windhover, The Cresset, Christianity and Literature and The Texas Observer. His nonfiction piece, “Jesus Took the Bus to Chicago: Goin’ Down the Road with the Blues,” was published in Ruminate’s Issue 01.
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